New initiatives in the treatment of breast cancer

Better targeted therapies will reduce the burden of treatment, while improving the outcomes

With the 5-year survival for women diagnosed with breast cancer at 90%, the thrust of new initiatives is to discover whether that outcome can be either improved or achieved with less or better targeted therapy. Breast cancer was one of the first tumours to be successfully treated with a targeted therapy: trastuzumab improved outcomes for women with HER2-positive breast cancer, initially when treating metastatic disease, and then in the adjuvant therapy setting.1